Our time has proved to be amazingly effective in gropingly building up a civilization which it has proved amazingly inept at…

Monica Grigorescu*

Our time has proved to be amazingly effective in gropingly building up a civilization which it has proved amazingly inept at putting in order. (André Maliaux)

    After so many crises which have followed each other in as many areas, we ought to admit that industrial and technological civilization is creating as many problems as it is capable of resolving. The myth of progress, one of the founding myths of our civilization, also appears to have collapsed as a myth. The development of modern society, spectacular as it is from an economist’s angle of vision, has not been able to society; stop a slide into human and moral underdevelopment. A deterioration of quality in relation to quantity makes only those things that can be actually measured appear to be real; unfortunately, things like poetry, suffering, or love are hardly quantifiable.

    Towards the end of his eventful life, Jean Monnet, a remarkable figure of the twentieth century, reasoned that, had he been able to start all over again, he would have begun with culture. A founding father of what was later to become the European Union, he expressed that belated belief in the pre-eminent role of culture as a part of greater civilization after he had tried for several decades to build a prosperous Europe in economic terms in the aftermath of a devastating war.

I. Jean Monnet founded the European Union at the end of his life.
II. Today technology isn’t as beneficial as it used to be.
III. Poetry and love have been disregarded lately.
IV. Quantity isn’t as relevant as quality nowadays.
V. Progress has also been threatened by the world crisis.

De acordo com as afirmações a respeito do texto acima, podemos dizer que